Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Animals have one of two kinds of symmetry – radial or bilateral, points out Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence .   Animals started by having radial symmetry. Why then did so many diverge into bilateral symmetry? Simple answer: Radial symmetry works fine if the approach is to wait for food. But it is a terrible setup if you want to navigate towards food. He expands on that.   A creature with radial symmetry would detect signals from and move in all directions. Bilateral symmetry, on the other hand, is designed for movement in two directions – ahead and left/right. The former is very complicated; the latter is so much simpler. (Which is why human engineers have designed everything that moves with bilateral symmetry – cars, planes, submarines).   While simpler on one front, bilateralism creates a new need – a decision-making capability . Which direction should one move in? Thus, all bilaterals, even the tiniest ones, have brains. Two rules are the min...

Every generation of teenagers comes up new slang that they use. It rarely involves coining new words (how would anyone understand a new word anyway?). Rather, it involves coining abbreviations (FR = for real) and acronyms for commonly used phrases; or using existing words to mean something else; or changing the form of an existing word to mean something (“adulting” = doing things an adult would do, a derogatory phrase meaning you are old and responsible (cringe)).   The reasons for this lingo are the usual. A sense of identity (distinct from adults in particular). Independence. Belonging within their peer groups. Code for certain commonly felt emotions.   I overhear a lot of this lingo when my 14 yo daughter talks to her friends. Of course, she isn’t keen to explain any of that slang to me. And even if she does explain it, she will insist I use it all wrong. And that I should stop trying to use such slang – I am not cool enough for it.   That, of course, is wh...

The concept of swaraj in the independence movement annoyed Ambedkar. Aakash Singh Rathore explains why in Ambedkar’s Preamble . With Gandhi leading the movement, the concept of freedom/independence had begun to take almost spiritual tones. For many (usually upper castes), spiritual is different from religious. For someone like Ambedkar, an untouchable, this was a distinction without a difference. What was the point of independence, he asked, if it would only result in the continuance of Brahmanical Hinduism (and oppression of the lower castes)?   The untouchables had good reason to be wary. They had hoped that the British would be their liberators. But the British had preserved the old social system and the exclusion of the untouchables from social and civic life continued. Ambedkar was determined that freedom from the British should not mean a continuation of the exclusion of the untouchables by the new (Indian) rulers.   Gandhian swaraj , contended Ambedkar, stoppe...

How do neurons work? Max Bennett explains in A Brief History of Intelligence . Edgar Adrian made 3 key findings on the topic in the 1920’s, for which he would win the Nobel Prize.   First , he found that neurons don’t send electric signals continuously. Rather, they fire all-or-nothing responses. On or Off, nothing in between. This raised a problematic question. Our senses can differentiate between levels of volume, strength of smells, amount of light etc. How could a simple On/Off-only mechanism convey shades?   To answer that question, Adrian took a muscle from the neck of a dead frog and attached a recording device to a single stretch-sensing neuron in that muscle. Then he did his experiment: how would the neuron convey different weights? Here is what his recording device noted:   The strength of the spike (On) did not vary with the weight. But the frequency of the spikes was proportional to the weight – higher the weight, higher the frequency of the spike...

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.   Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.   Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based...

A Brief History of Intelligence is written by an AI engineer who studied the brain! So why did Max Bennett study the brain? “The relations between AI and the brain goes both ways, while the brain can surely teach us about how to create artificial humanlike intelligence, AI can also teach us about the brain.” He clarifies early: it is the human brain he is referring to, not brains in general. He starts from the beginning, from the evolution of neurons .   Fungus. It is closer to animals than plants. How? Because fungus cannot do photosynthesis; it takes in food and oxygen. Yet one lineage (animals) went on to develop brains whereas the other (fungi) didn’t. Why the difference?   Well, animals and fungi adopted different strategies for food – animals kill (plants or other animals) and then digest food inside themselves. Fungi wait for things to die and then digest them outside their body. Fungi use a spray-and-pray approach – they spray trillions of singled ...